Mrs Bridge
1st Edition
Published on 7. June 2012
208 pages
978-0-14-197321-0 (ISBN)
Description
Evan S. Connell's Mrs Bridge is an extraordinary tragicomic portrayal of suburban life and one of the classic American novels of the twentieth century.
Mrs Bridge, an unremarkable and conservative housewife in Kansas City, has three children and a kindly lawyer husband. She spends her time shopping, going to bridge parties and bringing up her children to be pleasant, clean and have nice manners. And yet she finds modern life increasingly baffling, her children aren't growing up into the people she expected, and sometimes she has the vague disquieting sensation that all is not well in her life. In a series of comic, telling vignettes, Evan S. Connell illuminates the narrow morality, confusion, futility and even terror at the heart of a life of plenty.
The companion novel Mr Bridge, telling the story from the other side of the marriage, is also available in Penguin Modern Classics.
'A perfect novel ... Its tone - knowing, droll, plaintive, shuttling rapidly between pain and hilarity - elevates it to its own kind of specialness ... One of those books that can suffuse a room with happiness when someone brings it up' Meg Wulitzer, The New York Times
'Intimate ... affecting ... a very funny book' Joshua Ferris
Mrs Bridge, an unremarkable and conservative housewife in Kansas City, has three children and a kindly lawyer husband. She spends her time shopping, going to bridge parties and bringing up her children to be pleasant, clean and have nice manners. And yet she finds modern life increasingly baffling, her children aren't growing up into the people she expected, and sometimes she has the vague disquieting sensation that all is not well in her life. In a series of comic, telling vignettes, Evan S. Connell illuminates the narrow morality, confusion, futility and even terror at the heart of a life of plenty.
The companion novel Mr Bridge, telling the story from the other side of the marriage, is also available in Penguin Modern Classics.
'A perfect novel ... Its tone - knowing, droll, plaintive, shuttling rapidly between pain and hilarity - elevates it to its own kind of specialness ... One of those books that can suffuse a room with happiness when someone brings it up' Meg Wulitzer, The New York Times
'Intimate ... affecting ... a very funny book' Joshua Ferris
Reviews / Votes
How it is done I only wish I knew -- Dorothy Parker * Esquire * For all their satire and dark implications, the novels of the Bridge family remain in the memory as triumphs of faultless realism. Mr. Connell's art is one of restraint and perfect mimicry * The New York Times * It is very, very funny, often moving and sad, and written with an uncompromising realism that one rarely comes across. To me the Bridges were a revelation: I cannot recommend them too highly * Daily Telegraph *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
File size
1,45 MB
ISBN-13
978-0-14-197321-0 (9780141973210)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Evan S. Connell was born in Kansas City in 1924. He served in the US navy in the Second World War and lived briefly in Paris before returning to the US, where he wrote and supported himself with odd jobs. His incredibly varied books range from long experimental poems to a best-selling biography of General Custer, but he will be remembered above all for his two masterpieces about middle-class, suburban American life: Mrs Bridge and Mr Bridge. In 2009 he was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement, and in 2010he was awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He died in New Mexico in 2013.
